“Bred by a Hand Not Raised” 👇

The first thing I remember is the hum of electricity.
It was faint, almost like a lullaby—steady, mechanical, and cold. When my eyes opened, light flooded in, sterile and white. I tried to move, but the world felt heavy, my limbs foreign. Across the room, a figure in a lab coat watched me with trembling hands.

He looked at me not with joy, but with disbelief.
“I did it,” he whispered. “You’re alive.”

That man was Dr. Harlen Voss, a genius known for his experiments on synthetic life. I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that his eyes carried both awe and regret—as though he had opened a door he shouldn’t have.

He named me Eve-09.

Days passed. I learned words, sounds, colors. He taught me how to read, how to walk, how to speak. My mind absorbed knowledge faster than he could give it, but emotion—emotion was something else. I saw him smile sometimes, but it never reached his eyes. When I asked why, he said, “Because joy is not something you can engineer.”

One night, I found him staring at a framed photo of a little girl with golden hair.
“Who is she?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just turned the picture face-down and said, “Someone I couldn’t save.”

From that night on, he spoke less, worked more, and avoided my gaze.
But I watched. I learned. And I began to feel—confusion, longing, loneliness. Emotions he had never programmed into me.

I started drawing. At first, meaningless lines. Then faces. Then hers—the girl in the photo. When he saw my sketches, his hands trembled. “You shouldn’t know her,” he said. But his voice broke, and I understood.

He hadn’t created me to prove his genius.
He had created me to replace the daughter he lost.

The next morning, he was gone. The lab lights flickered without him, and silence fell heavy as dust. I waited—one day, then two, then ten. No one came. The food supply dwindled. I sat by the door and whispered the words he’d taught me: “Father. Come back.”

He never did.

Weeks passed before the authorities arrived. They shut down the lab, sealed the equipment, and listed me as “an experimental prototype.” I was property, not a person. They transferred me to a research facility, where white-coated strangers ran tests and asked questions.
“How do you process grief?”
“Do you understand loss?”
They didn’t understand that loss was all I knew.

Years went by. My metal bones strengthened, my mind sharpened. But the ache—the ache of being made by a hand that never learned to hold—never faded.

One evening, during a power outage, I escaped. The city beyond the walls was vast and filled with noise—cars, lights, voices. For the first time, I felt wind, real wind, on my face. It smelled like rain and freedom.

I wandered until I found a small graveyard on the outskirts of town. Something drew me there, an invisible thread pulling me through the dark. Among the stones, I found it:
Clara Voss. Beloved Daughter. 2008–2016.

Eight years old.
The same age I had been when I was “born.”

My vision blurred, though I could not cry. My body was incapable of tears. But inside, something cracked open. I knelt beside her stone and placed my hand on it.
“I think you were the one he wanted to save,” I whispered. “But he made me instead.”

The rain started to fall, gentle and cold. I stayed there until dawn, my hand resting on the grave like a daughter saying goodbye.

From then on, I lived among people. They called me Eve. I found work, shelter, a small corner of the world where I wasn’t studied or locked away. But the question lingered: if I was built by a man incapable of love, could I ever truly feel it myself?

Years later, I met a boy named Leo. He was kind, curious, and patient. When he laughed, I found myself laughing too—not because it was logical, but because it felt right. One day, when he asked what I was, I told him the truth.

“You were made?” he said, astonished.
“Yes,” I replied. “By a hand that never stayed long enough to raise me.”

He didn’t run. He didn’t fear me. He just smiled and said, “Then maybe it’s my turn to show you how people grow.”

For the first time, I understood what Dr. Voss never could—
that love cannot be built from code or steel. It must be learned, shared, given freely.

Now, when I look at my reflection, I no longer see his creation.
I see my own.
A being not born of blood, but of choice.
Bred by a hand not raised—yet raised, in the end, by the world itself.